Best to freeze. Refridgerate for at least one week.
This year’s vintage was ready yesterday, and tasted accordingly.
Emmi pitää sarjispäiväkirjaa, Neron kasvatus ja hoito. Missasimme eiliset pikkujoulut, siitä pahoittelut isäntäväelle. Toivottavasti juhlat menivät railakkaasti. Roosa osti tänään sikiölle joululahjan.
On uskomatonta, että kahden virkkeen “biisi” voi jäädä soimaan päähän. Vaikka Kirkon Usko toivo rakkaus -kampanjan toimivuudesta voi olla monta mieltä, on tv-mainoksen lyhyeen katkeava luritus kummitellut päässäni jo useamman päivän. Huomasin kunnianhimoisesti tehdyssä kampanjasaitissa muutamia pikkumokia, kuten Videot-sivulla olevan tv-mainoksen urlin, tai, pahempana, julkkishaastattelujen huonon mikityksen.
Kyse on toki katsojan tulkinnasta, mutta minusta on hauskaa, että näen Matkalla-blogin 2d-koodissa penkillä istuvan ihmishahmon, matkalaukku vierellään.
Control theorist John Doyle has a simple plan to make the internet faster — just make the traffic measurements better. Doyle studies what makes free-scale networks robust:
“The reason the bacterium works so well, Doyle finds, is that it is organized in much the same way as the Internet. Both the Internet and E. coli are conceptually organized like a bow tie, with a broad fan of incoming material flowing into a central knot and then flowing into another broad fan of outgoing material. On the Internet, the incoming fan is made up of data from a huge range of sources — e-mail, YouTube videos, Skype phone calls, and the like. In E. coli, the incoming fan is made up of the many sorts of food it eats. As information and food move into their respective bow ties, they get homogenized: E. coli breaks down its food into a few building blocks, while the Internet breaks down its motley incoming data streams into streams of standardized packets.”
“Today computers sense Internet congestion by noticing how many packets they lose. That’s like trying to drive down a highway by just looking at what’s 20 feet ahead of you, constantly accelerating and then slamming on the brakes as soon as you see something.”
“Doyle and his coworkers enable computers to use more information about traffic flow, noting how long it takes for their packets to get to their destination. The less traffic, the shorter the time, and with these traffic reports on hand, their computers make much smarter decisions. The result is a string of victories for high-speed Internet communication competitions. In the last face-off in 2006, they managed to send 17 gigabits — about a full-length movie’s worth — each second across the Internet.”
I’m setting up a demo called Hello Searcher. There’s nothing there just yet, but I’ll announce more later.
Journalisti-lehden toimituksen päiväkirja vaikuttaa hyvältä. Lotta Tuohino esittelee Erotuksena-menetelmää hauskasti, ja Jussi Tuulensuu bongasi Helsingin Kaartin poliisitalosta fonttiyhdistelmän, joka “ylittää inhimillisen sietokyvyn rajat”.
Ilmaisjakelulehti Vartti panostaa nettiin. Samalla paperilehden julkaisu puolittuu, kun sunnuntainumero lakkautetaan. Viikonloput näyttävät aiheuttavan lehdille hankaluuksia muutenkin. Vartin paikallisuutisia, joista tulee “runsaasti” lukijoilta, tullaan näkemään jatkossa Ilta-Sanomissa, Metrossa ja Satasessa.
History Net: Lucky Strikes were first introduced in 1916 to compete with the phenomenally successful Camel. The name was revived from an 1871 pipe tobacco brand that referenced the Gold Rush days. The motto, “It’s Toasted!”, is pure marketing absurdism; all cigarettes are toasted.
In 1942, Lucky Strike changed the color of its packs from green to white due to dye shortage. Its slogan: “Lucky Strike green has gone to war.” Ad campaign coincides with US invasion of North Africa. Sales increase 38 percent.
Other gems from the article:
1915: POETRY
Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.
— Graham Lee Hemminger, Penn State Froth, Tobacco
1950: Lucky Strike’s “Be Happy, Go Lucky” wins TV Guide’s commercial of the year. (Cheerleaders sing: “Yes, Luckies get our loudest cheers on campus and on dates. With college gals and college guys a Lucky really rates.”)
1952: P. Lorillard introduces Kent cigarettes, with the “Micronite” filter. At the press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Lorillard boasted that the “Micronite” filter offered “the greatest health protection in cigarette history.” Its secret: asbestos.
Dice stacking, vol. 3. “Nobody knows what the hell this is, but this kid sure is getting much better at it.” Great video. Via Janne.
Seam carving for content aware image resizing, a video demo of an interesting method of repurposing images for different display sizes. Neat stuff, though I’m guessing many art photographers and photojournalists may find some of its altering aspects a little dubious. Via Virbana on Jaiku.
Yritysten ip-osoitteista tulleita Wikipedia-muutoksia koskevassa jutussa on kaksi oivallista löytöä:
“Tietoenatorin osalta paljastui yksittäinen ip-osoite, jolla on tehty 130 lähes pelkästään jääkiekkoilijoita koskevaa muutosta.
Huhtikuussa 2005 ex-kansanedustajan Jari Vilenin suomenkielisestä henkilödokumentista poistettiin gradun plagiointia koskeva osuus. Wikipedian ylläpito huomasi muokkaajan ip-osoitteen kuuluvan eduskunnalle ja palautti artikkelin alkuperäiseen muotoon.”
True to Slashdot, the discussion on the new Firehose service wildly spins off into a debate on the origin of the idiom “to drink from a firehose”. Some recognized it from the cult movie UHF, while others testily retorted that it’s been common parlance at MIT since way back when.
I got a kick out of this comment by Gulthek. Here’s the last paragraph:
“To bite the bullet is 1700s military slang, from old medical custom of having the patient bite a bullet during an operation to divert attention from pain and reduce screaming. To bite (one’s) tongue “refrain from speaking” is 1593. To bite the dust “die” is 1750. To bite off more than one can chew (c.1880) is U.S. slang, from plug tobacco.”
Oh yes, I’m back from Norway. The trip went well. I saw old friends, I made new friends. If you speak Finnish, listen to a report on the trip by an old friend.
I’m off to Storås with 36 compatriots, brave adventurers all. Back next Tuesday.
Disclaimer: Photo has nothing to do with Norway. It was taken by Markku in May 2006 not far from Grand Canyon.
reCAPTCHA seems to be making the rounds quite widely right now, but I thought it was too neat to not mention it. Reminiscent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, reCAPTCHA is a clever way of distributing the word-recognition work involved in scanning old books, and, at the same time, providing humanness-credentials needed to foil spambots. And it’s accessible, too (though there’s no OCR benefits from the audio version)!
We’re going to the Storås Festival (in Finnish) again this year, and you’re invited! We’ve organized a trip to the festival from Finland twice before, and the experience has been fantastic: good people, new friends, a lot of fun, and a great atmosphere. (And this from a person who’s not really all that into rock festivals.)
There’s been a lot of interest in the trip this year, but it’s too early to tell how many’ll end up going. So there’s still room if you’re interested. The bus departs from Helsinki on Monday, July 23. We arrive in Stockholm the next morning, and may pick up more passengers there. We return to Finland on Monday night, the 30th of July. The whole package costs some 150 euros, including bus and ferry passage and a three-day pass to the festival.
The official festival site is in Norwegian, of course.
Trying to stave away the boredom of being home sick, I ran across a few amusing dog stories. When your dog knows quantum physics, you may have some strange conversations, such as the certainty of steak falling and the reasonable expectation of bunnies made of cheese.
Then again, a curious, hungry, and stubborn dog can cause plenty of annoyance without knowing quantum physics. Not to mention dogs in elk.
I’m also learning about lolcats and kitty pidgin. Also see Wikipedia’s entry on lolcats.
Jari Lindholm: Guardian ja LAT: web on tärkein uutiskanava.
Matti Lintulahti on samoilla linjoilla. Lintulahden mainitsema USA Todayn “Web 2.0 -päivitys” toi saitille juttujen äänestyksen, lukijoille profiilisivut, ja jälkimoderoinnin.
Tyypillisesti kaikki eivät olleet tyytyväisiä, ja monet lukijat purnasivat päätoimittajan blogissa. Surkuhupaisaa onkin katsoa USAToday.comin lukijamääriä päivityksen jälkeen.
Päivitetty: 13.3.2007 klo 17:52
V-lehti veti lehtensä jakelusta huumemyönteisen jutun takia. Juttu kuitenkin leviää netissä, ja itse jutussa ei ole mitään vikaa — lukuunottamatta sitä, että se käsittelee asiaa yksipuolisesti. Kerrassaan ennenkuulumatonta huumekeskustelussa! Lue juttu itse.
Päivitys: Päätoimittaja Kohtala hyllytettiin? Mieletöntä.
Bruce Schneier: “We used to quip that ‘password’ is the most common password. Now it’s ‘password1.’ Who said users haven’t learned anything about security?”
